catching up

my current wips. i haven't knitted all summer. summer weather just isn't really the vibe for knitting. but i went to the knitting group on tuesday and got some help with two of the projects (the yellow vest) and the loosely-woven white shawl/swimsuit cover-up. the weather is turning a bit cooler, though we've had a lovely indian summer of late, and so it feels like knitting time again.

the child and her good friend headed off to lisbon on tuesday. school starts next week. she sent me a load of pictures today from their exploration of the city. we were going to accompany them down there, but husband has a big audit at work next week, and so the timing wasn't good. we decided we'll go in november when it's rainy and dark here and the girls are settled in. 

we had a lot of fun with the girls - roping them in to helping at the harvest market at the museum (we took a little break in the new kro stue here). we did puzzles and played cards and explored the area and ate some good food and drank some wine and watched real housewives. it was all quite relaxed and chill and just what we needed.

i joined noma's coffee club and i fear i will never be the same. that buku sayisa is absolutely incredible. we haven't tried the chelchele yet. we're trying to savor it. husband is also crazy for it. it isn't cheap, but we've decided we're worth it. life truly is too short for crap coffee.

i've started on my next set of taylor swift tea towels. i'm doing speak now this time, as i had all the colors and they work perfectly for the setup i want to play with this time. i've only just started - i'm still trying out all of the colors in a section at the start, to get acquainted. i found a mistake and managed to fix it. the loom never lies, it shows you everything. 

i think i'm coming down with the first cold of the season. my throat is sore and i'm achy in my shoulders. it seems like the change of season is always accompanied by a bug. it's no doubt also a result of slowing down after running around for several weeks. and of staying up half the night, watching the news of charlie kirk being shot. i'd like to say i have mixed feelings about that, but i honestly don't. these people don't face the consequences of their toxicity very often. i wonder if we won't look back and realize that the civil war had already begun.

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i really loved reading this piece about books. 

eddies in the space-time continuum

i found an old ring in a box today, one that i hadn't been able to find for some years. i even swear i'd looked in that box already, several times, but today, there it was. it's the black hills gold ring with the marquise cut diamond. the ring was my mom's and the diamond a remnant of my first, mistaken engagement. i would occasionally have pangs of sadness that i had lost it, but apparently i only mislaid it. for about a decade or so. i hardly ever wear gold jewelry anymore, but i'm glad i finally found it. the other ring is my mom's engagement and wedding ring. when i found the lost one, i went digging in a more recent jewelry bowl, looking for mom's ring. they kind of fit together, but also don't. but it was in a way that was pleasing to me today. i think it's part of the always surprising grief process. i even put them back on after my shower. i just need to be wearing them right now. for some reason unknown even to myself. they make me feel close to mom in a way that i seem to need right now. which is perhaps why that ring showed up today in that box that i swear i had looked in before. perhaps it was there today because i needed it to be. when things like that happen, i always think of arthur dent, stuck on that planet where he perfected the sandwich made of some strange beasts that periodically ran through, slipping between worlds on some eddy in the space-time continuum. today, an eddy brought the ring back to the box where it belonged. just at the moment i needed it.

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in these days of zoom meetings, what's on people's bookshelves?

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whenever i had a break today, i read some of this old interview with murakami in the paris review. that made me happy. and made me want to write. and maybe even made me want to go for a run. but not so much that i did so.

* * *

there were a bunch of great quotes in the murakami article and i want to save some of them here, capital letters and all:

"When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait. " 

”I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.” 

”When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” 

”All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them. We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal. I have to go back to the real world, of course, and pick up the sane part. But if didn’t have the insane part, the sick part, I wouldn’t be here.” 

“…a sense of humor is a very stable thing. You have to be cool to be humorous. When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.” 

”Experience itself is meaning.” – Murakami (i might have to have that one tattooed.)

kind of appropriate that, since the other phrase i'd like tattooed is from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "reality is frequently inaccurate." said by Ford Prefect, not Arthur Dent. and one more, from Bitov, "unreality is a condition of life." that's it, my next three tattoos.

another goodbye

it's been a bit too much lately. losing dad. having my dream job done away with ("we're not ready for co-creation" and besides, "you're not commercial.").  getting turned down for another job after being tortured with an agonizing wait of an entire month. and now aunt mary has died as well. these are relentlessly grey, cold, dark days. it really is all too much.

aunt mary was such a presence in our family. married to my dad's oldest brother, she raised five children and has countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren. i'm so glad i visited her when i was there when dad died back in november. although i didn't know it would be the last time, it was a very nice visit. her beautiful home on the hill with the views of vast rolling prairie (these photos were taken from her house one summer) and traces of an old indian trail if you looked in the right spot when the grass was just right in the summer or when winter's snows had filled the ghosts of the ruts. you could feel the history blowing there in the prairie winds. and her cabinets of curiosities - quilts, antiques, artifacts. she always had stories to tell, stories that more often than not resulted in everyone dissolving in genuine laughter. she was always so positive and cheerful. sort of a stalwart ray of sunshine in the midst of the chaos of our big family. we sipped tea and ate cookies and listened to family stories and it was always wonderful to gather around her kitchen table.

she was 89, so she had a long, full life. uncle jim had died back in 2008, but she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so she wasn't alone. she was, like all of us, hit hard by my dad's death and i wonder if perhaps she didn't think it was time to go and join those who had gone before.

although i'm not sure that i believe that's what happens, it is comforting to think of it at times like this. i can just hear her laugh and dad's laugh and uncle jim's and uncle red's as well. and i hope that maybe somewhere they are now laughing and swapping stories together once again, perhaps playing a game of "tell" (the card game that's actually called "oh hell") with grandma kate. and that they know that we miss them. and that we are forever changed by the time we had with them.

glorious summer days

these gorgeous summer days don't really get any more relaxed. frieda (aka paws mcgraw) demonstrates.

sabin braided a clover flower crown. we all tried it on. husband said i looked swedish in it. i'm choosing to see that as a good thing. oddly enough, no one took my picture.

why is it again that they say not to photograph against the light? sabin spent last week with a friend and her family at a summer house up north. we were very glad to have her home again.

sabin took this gorgeous shot of our dear, elderly lila belle. she's been loving the warm summer days as well and has even been seen playing, despite her 14+ years.

even husband tried on the clover crown. he's very secure in his masculinity that way. we had to have a photo of that. maybe there's no photos of me because i'm mostly behind the camera.

the color sneaks back into my world

i suppose it's just these sunny, summer days we've been treated to, but it feels somehow like color is returning to my world. it's been a tough time recently with molly's mastitis, our chickens disappearing (it turns out it wasn't a fox, they were stolen!), my borrelia diagnosis and then losing frankie. a lot of things happening in quick succession that have sapped my energy and robbed me of my inspiration and, you probably noticed, my words.

despite losing frankie on monday, it was on the whole a good week. i took the last of my antibiotics and i feel myself returning to more or less feeling normal health-wise, tho' i do occasionally run a low-grade fever for most of a day (i hope that stops now), which zaps my energy again. but spending time with sabin in the sunshine, doing creative projects helped greatly.

it's hard to be down in the dumps when your old favorite converse have been turned into bright, cheery rainbows.

the garden, especially the fruit bushes and those strawberries, are in full swing and picking and processing all that fruit makes me feel industrious and satisfied. i know how much we'll enjoy the fruits of all my labors come autumn and winter. that has raised my spirits as well.

the perfect afternoon i spent painting in the garden with sabin on friday also went a long way towards reawakening what has been a dormant sense of creativity. i have a tendency to go through a low-level depression at times without even really realizing it myself, except in odd ways (i think the bits of blue in my hair were an attempt to pull myself out of it that i wasn't even really aware of on a conscious level). it's only when it begins to lift that i realize it was there.

but it is beginning to lift. like a fog clearing away. one that i had become so accustomed to, that i wasn't even really aware of it myself. it likely started with our prolonged winter and ever-protracted spring. then molly got sick and i spent a couple of weeks of sleepless nights, worrying over and feeding kittens in the night. i've also been reading some douglas kennedy novels, which are wonderful, but full of tragic stories that feel like they're happening to friends of mine, so well-drawn are the characters. and i realize now that it has all fed an underlying feeling of blue (and not the good blue room kind).

but today, as i pulled fabric for several baby quilts (suddenly, my friends are all having babies), it hit me that the blue of my world was turning more colorful once again. and it seems at least some of my words have returned. molly is well (and begging to go outside to rendezvous with the papa kitty again (don't worry, she's not allowed)) and the kittens are at at the very height of playful perfection and tho' i miss frankie very much, i now get to keep little frieda, my kitten who smiles in her sleep.

it also helps that dinner came from the garden - fresh kale, shallots and new potatoes. there is little that feels more satisfying than that, unless it's a kitten who smiles in her sleep.

here's hoping that summer is treating you all very well.

more scenes of summer bliss

at the risk of bragging, i'll tell you my child made me a smoothie for breakfast this morning.

i enjoyed it while kittens entertained me with their playful antics.

they're getting to be pretty good climbers.
easy on the designer furniture there, periwinkle.

in the afternoon, we painted in the garden.

the child learned a lot about mixing colors in her painting lessons.

and she taught me a lot this afternoon.

her painting is way better than mine.

tho' mine's not finished yet, so it will improve.

danielle found a hollow in the pear tree and explored it.

we had a relaxed hour or so with matilde, who is much happier at her new stable.

the kittens played some more.

as kittens will do.

perrie climbed a tree.

her mother was not pleased.

strawberries were picked (and frozen and juiced).

and then it was time for bed.

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hope your summer is a glorious one as well.

these are the days we will remember.